The BBC reports that goats were released from jail in the DR Congo:

The beasts were due to appear in court, charged with being sold illegally by the roadside.

The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining.

Enforcement of the rules is often a tricky business, but this example is quite funny.

Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo said he found the goats just in time during a routine jail visit.

I guess you could say the goats are lucky that the justice system in DR Congo has maintained its checks and balances.

The goats might have been there for another simple reason, such as bribery or corruption, and the “court” story is just an extended joke.

Here is an interesting perspective on food safety from BBC News:

“Selecting benign prey such as salmon makes sense from a safety point of view,” wrote Dr Chris Darimont, from the University of Victoria, BC, and his colleagues in the journal BMC Ecology. “While hunting deer, wolves commonly incur serious and often fatal injuries,” the researchers said, adding that salmon fishing is much less time consuming than tracking deer in the forest. “In addition to safety benefits, we determined that salmon also provides enhanced nutrition over deer, especially in fat and energy.”

Yes, it turns out wolves prefer to fish for food rather than hunt. Makes perfect sense and brings up the question of salmon stock relative to wolf behavior. Perhaps the fish shortages that led to cancellation of the salmon season will also lead wolves towards more risky behavior.

The child of an expert in genetic barcoding decided to apply his father’s teachings to fish in New York. Reuters tells a story from the perspective of “teenage sleuths”:

The two classmates from New York’s Trinity school collected and sent off 60 fish samples to the University of Guelph in Canada. Of 56 samples that could be identified by a four-year-old DNA identification technique, 14 were mislabeled.

In all cases, the fish was labeled as a more costly type, apparently ruling out simple chance. It was the first known student use of DNA barcoding technology in a public market.

White tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, while Mediterranean red mullet was actually a goatfish from the Caribbean.

Hard to reconcile the finer points of these fish with the American habit of sloshing everything into unlabeled/unmarked wasabi and soy sauce.

I wonder what would happen if these prodigies of identity management focused their research on vegetables?

“It bears on a number of issues — food safety, fraud and protection of endangered species,” said Bob Hanner of Guelph, who oversaw the analysis of samples. Other imports, such as meat, could also benefit from DNA checks.

Scientists have catalogued barcodes for about 46,000 animal species so far (www.barcodinglife.org). The barcoders are looking to raise $150 million to create 5 million records from 500,000 animal species by 2014 — or a cost of $30 each.

Strangely enough they only seem interested in animal species. I smell an ulterior motive.